eli5: how does pedialyte work to restore hydration as opposed to regular water?
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We don’t just have pure water in our bodies, it’s a component of liquids like blood which have a lot of other nutrients in it. If you drink a lot of water without eating or drinking anything else, it dilutes those nutrients which isn’t ideal. Pedialyte and things like gatorade are designed to give you those things in addition to water so your body can recover quicker. It’s especially important in babies because their size means it can take a deceptively small amount of water to dilute things to dangerous levels. This is why it’s not recommended to give babies any water at all, only milk/formula, before 6 months old.
The cells lining the gut have certain transporters that move sugar, salt, and water together. These are more effective at moving water than the gut is at absorbing pure water alone.
You are basically a soup.
The important things that your body needs are all chemically reactive components that get broken down and used as fuel or the building blocks of new cells and useful materials. In the soup metaphor this is your chicken, onion, celery, salt, ect.
Water isn’t chemically reactive in the way that things like sugars and proteins are. Water isn’t broken down in your body, it’s function is to dissolve all the other stuff you need and facilitate everything moving around and mingling at the right concentration. In the soup metaphor water is… well water.
When you get “dehydrated” you are losing mostly water but certainly not ONLY water as is pretty reasonable to assume given the literal meaning of the word.
It’s like pouring out the broth in the soup. Adding water to compensate is really important. Without more water the soup could start burning (things could go bad real quickly). But replacing complex broth with plain water isn’t ideal. Your ingredients arent burning but you have weak soup.
Pedialite is like pouring broth straight back into the soup. It is intended to be a similar balance of water, and salts as what you lose when exerting yourself or if you’ve chemically dehydrated yourself (hangovers typically).
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